Neurocognition of temporal attention

• Applicant: Dr. Cornelia Kranczioch
• Subject Area: General, Cognitive and Mathematical Psychology
• Term: from 2009 to 2018
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 109055423

In many instances life is characterised by the requirement to perform without errors in a stimulusladen environment. Attention helps to navigate through this environment by facilitating the processing of potentially relevant information through the allocation of resources in space and in time. This research proposal aims to investigate the limits that arise when attention needs to be distributed in time in order to successfully process temporally proximate information. Such limits become for instance apparent when negotiating a motorway junction that is swamped with traffic signs and missing the sign indicating your slip road. Limits in temporal attention seem however not be fundamental and unavoidable. Indeed, different variables may contribute to such flexibility. These could be variables intrinsic to an individual’s brain activity, which might best be understood as ‘brain states’. Other variables might be extrinsic to the individual such as affective stimulus content or background music. The proposed research aims to investigate how intrinsic and extrinsic variables affect the limits of temporal attention and thus, what we can consciously perceive when information needs to be processed rapidly. This will be achieved by conducting four conceptually related projects in which neurophysiological and behavioural correlates of temporal attention are studied.

• DFG Programme: Independent Junior Research Groups
• Host: Professor Dr. Herbert Witte